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posted on: Monday, 7 October 2013

Harper's Bazaar is featuring an oldie but a goody on their November 2013 cover, no offense Madonna. The legendary queen of pop is shot by Terry Richardson for the cover and rather interesting accompanying images. Who would have ever thought we'd open up an issue of Harper's and see Madonna in a chain mail mask? Just goes to show you can never predict anything these days when it comes to fashion and glossies.

Here's a sneak peek at Madonna's interview with Harper's. If you read nothing else, may we suggest you skip to the bottom and read about the adoption of her baby boy, David. For the all the rumour-slinging, it's good to have some perspective put into place here...

“If I can't be daring in my work or the way I live my life, then I don't really see the point of being on this planet.”

On her teenage years: “Most people thought I was strange. I didn't have many friends; I might not have had any friends. But it all turned out good in the end, because when you aren't popular and you don't have a social life, it gives you more time to focus on your future. And for me, that was going to New York to become a REAL artist. To be able to express myself in a city of nonconformists. To revel and shimmy and shake in a world and be surrounded by daring people.”

“When you're 25, it's a little bit easier to be daring, especially if you are a pop star, because eccentric behavior is expected from you.”

On arriving in New York: “This wasn't anything I prepared for in Rochester, Michigan. Trying to be a professional dancer, paying my rent by posing nude for art classes, staring at people staring at me naked. Daring them to think of me as anything but a form they were trying to capture with their pencils and charcoal. I was defiant. Hell-bent on surviving. On making it. But it was hard and it was lonely, and I had to dare myself every day to keep going.”

On adopting her son David: “I decided that I had an embarrassment of riches and that there were too many children in the world without parents or families to love them. I applied to an international adoption agency and went through all the bureaucracy, testing, and waiting that everyone else goes through when they adopt. As fate would have it, in the middle of this process a woman reached out to me from a small country in Africa called Malawi, and told me about the millions of children orphaned by AIDS. Before you could say "Zikomo Kwambiri," I was in the airport in Lilongwe heading to an orphanage in Mchinji, where I met my son David. And that was the beginning of another daring chapter of my life. I didn't know that trying to adopt a child was going to land me in another shit storm. But it did. I was accused of kidnapping, child trafficking, using my celebrity muscle to jump ahead in the line, bribing government officials, witchcraft, you name it. Certainly I had done something illegal!

This was an eye-opening experience. A real low point in my life. I could get my head around people giving me a hard time for simulating masturbation onstage or publishing my Sex book, even kissing Britney Spears at an awards show, but trying to save a child's life was not something I thought I would be punished for. Friends tried to cheer me up by telling me to think of it all as labor pains that we all have to go through when we give birth. This was vaguely comforting. In any case, I got through it. I survived.”

“One of the many things I learned from all of this: If you aren't willing to fight for what you believe in, then don't even enter the ring.”